Streit Alexander, Pham Binh, Brown Ross
Faculty of Information Technology, Queensland University of Techonology, Brisbane QLD, Australia.
IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2008 Jan-Feb;14(1):61-72. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2007.70426.
Information uncertainty is inherent in many problems and is often subtle and complicated to understand. Although visualization is a powerful means for exploring and understanding information, information uncertainty visualization is ad hoc and not widespread. This paper identifies two main barriers to the uptake of information uncertainty visualization: firstly, the difficulty of modeling and propagating the uncertainty information; and secondly, the difficulty of mapping uncertainty to visual elements. To overcome these barriers, we extend the spreadsheet paradigm to encapsulate uncertainty details within cells. This creates an inherent awareness of the uncertainty associated with each variable. The spreadsheet can hide the uncertainty details, enabling the user to think simply in terms of variables. Furthermore, the system can aid with automated propagation of uncertainty information, since it is intrinsically aware of the uncertainty. The system also enables mapping the encapsulated uncertainty to visual elements via the formula language and a visualization sheet. Support for such low-level visual mapping provides flexibility to explore new techniques for information uncertainty visualization.
信息不确定性在许多问题中都存在，而且往往微妙且复杂，难以理解。尽管可视化是探索和理解信息的有力手段，但信息不确定性可视化是临时的，并未广泛应用。本文指出了信息不确定性可视化应用的两个主要障碍：其一，对不确定性信息进行建模和传播存在困难；其二，将不确定性映射到视觉元素存在困难。为克服这些障碍，我们扩展了电子表格范式，以便在单元格中封装不确定性细节。这会使人们对与每个变量相关的不确定性产生内在认知。电子表格可以隐藏不确定性细节，让用户仅从变量角度进行简单思考。此外，该系统能够辅助不确定性信息的自动传播，因为它本质上了解不确定性。该系统还能通过公式语言和可视化工作表将封装的不确定性映射到视觉元素。对这种低层次视觉映射的支持为探索信息不确定性可视化的新技术提供了灵活性。
